Barack Obama has chosen uncontrolled and unbridled government spending, much of it directed to his cronies and fellow ideologues, as his solution to restarting the economy. This has created an enormous amount of new debt for the nation with nothing to show for it. One of his predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt, also chose that route as part of his plan to rescue the American economy. However, he never took it to the extreme that Obama has done, with the aid of his allies in the Democratic Party. During Obama's tenure, he has added over $4,000 billion ($4 trillion) to the national debt.